Training sessions in pop culture Leonard Maltin praised Burt Reynolds's charm in Semi-Tough, a film that parodied est. Werner Erhard and his courses have been referenced in popular culture in various forms of fictional media including literature, film, television and theatre. The original course,…

Nearly everyone has experienced it: After a night of poor sleep, you don’t feel as alert as you should. Your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new study from MIT reveals what happens inside the brain as these momentary failures of attention…

When your application suddenly fails at 3 AM, logs will be your best friend the next morning. But until this happens, we often treat logs as an afterthought. Sometimes there is a discussion on log levels or wording of the message, but we rarely go beyond that. After all, what's so interesting in…

We’re rolling out changes to NotebookLM to make it fundamentally smarter and more powerful. First, a set of back-end improvements provide a major boost to performance and quality, and second, we are expanding the ability to set goals for your notebook, allowing each notebook to adapt to your needs.…

photo cred: my dad People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline. I’m not…

Competition The Pixel 10 Pro starts at $1000/€1100, which sounds like serious high-end smartphone money, give or take. The vanilla Pixel 10 goes for $200/€200 less, the 10 Pro XL asks $200/€200 more, while the previous generation Pro's pricing is more of a moot point, but it's safe to say it's…

Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts: 2025-10-28 When your Worker slows down or starts throwing errors, finding the root cause shouldn't require hours of log analysis and trial-and-error debugging. You should have clear visibility into what's happening at every step of your application's…

I’m on the right, biting a nail nervously. We’re in an Italian hotel because this happened on day 1 of our offsite. On Monday the AWS us-east-1 region had its worst outage in over 10 years. The whole thing lasted over 16 hours and affected 140 AWS services, including, critically, EC2. SLAs were…

I’ve been working with containers professionally for several years now, using Docker and Kubernetes daily in production environments. Like many developers, I initially treated containers as a “black box” - I knew how to use them, but didn’t really understand what was happening under the hood. It…

In the previous article about rethinking my backups I had a TODO item regarding moving away from using intermediary dumps of database content. Here's some notes about that. The old way Not ideal Redundant data storage Constant change The new way Learnings Avoid pipe confusion with…

We recently published a blog post with our reaction to the new Google Developer Program and how it impacts your freedom to use the devices that you own in the ways that you want. The post garnered quite a lot of feedback and interest from the community and press, as well as various civil society…

This article was adapted from a Google Tech on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office. By Arham Jain Is your code a tangled mess of business logic and side effects? Mixing database calls, network requests, and other…

I now think that AI/LLMs suck the joy out of programming. I’ve used spicy auto-complete, as well as agents running in my IDE, in my CLI, or on GitHub’s server-side. I’ve been experimenting enough with LLM/AI-driven programming to have an opinion on it. And it kind of sucks. I started programming…

By Kanu Tewary and Andrew Trenk Tech on the Toilet (TotT) is a weekly one-page publication about software development that is posted in bathrooms in Google offices worldwide. At Google, TotT is a trusted source for high quality technical content and software engineering best practices. TotT episodes…

One year from now, with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, we will change the default settings of Chrome to enable “Always Use Secure Connections”. This means Chrome will ask for the user's permission before the first access to any public site without HTTPS. The “Always Use Secure…

Follow @popovicu94 If you carefully read the Linux kernel docs, you will find an interesting statement: Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML). Today, we’ll explore how you can start an unconventional VM by…

Over the past three months, a team of experienced, like-minded engineers and I have been building something really cool within Amazon Bedrock. While I'm pretty excited about what we are building, there is another unique thing about our team - most of our code is written by AI agents such as Amazon Q…

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com In Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling 2016 memoir of “a family and a culture in crisis,” J.D. Vance, now vice-president of the United States, gives…

NEW YORK (AP) — The trouble started every day at around 3 p.m., after Cathy Higgins had spent five or six hours staring at an array of computer screens at her desk. Her university job overseeing research projects involved peering closely at numbers and details on contracts, applications and budgets.…

TikTok and airlines have something in common with your search engine, your grocery app, and (increasingly) your car: They start out great, lock you in, and then quietly get worse while you keep using them. That very familiar decline now has a catchy name: “enshittification.” Cory Doctorow has been…

Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era Severin Matusek, Nick Houde and Paloma Moniz Building the culture we want requires a radical change in mindset, and action. The dream of a free and open Internet isn't dead—but in 2025, it's definitely more complicated. Published Oct. 15, 2025 Share this! We…

When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The…

People often ask me what I mean when I say “JPEG XL is simply the best thought out and forward thinking image formats there is. Nothing else is close.” This is article is just one example of why. When I heard that JPEG XL’s encoder doesn’t care about bit depth, it sounded almost reckless (and I was…

Driving on one of New York’s poorly maintained and crowded roads, I found myself in a situation one can more safely observe through numerous YouTube ‘bad driver’ videos: a driver for whom all other traffic apparently ceased to exist confidently pulled into a lane I already happened to occupy. After…

I first heard of Mark Fisher when I downloaded a large torrent file advertising itself as some ‘Academic and Theoretical eBook Megapack’ that contained a fairly heterogenous mix of classic texts in the social sciences, philosophy, literary theory, feminism, and economics. This was in 2015, when I…

GitHub Pages, our static site hosting service, has always had a very simple architecture. From launch up until around the beginning of 2015, the entire service ran on a single pair of machines (in active/standby configuration) with all user data stored across 8 DRBD backed partitions. Every 30…

I was privileged to deliver the opening keynote at this month's FediForum, a conference for people building and supporting the open social web. My talk touched on what's happening now, drew on my experiences building Elgg and Known and investing at Matter Ventures, and gave participants three…

written on October 17, 2025 In August I wrote about my experiments with replacing MCP (Model Context Protocol) with code. In the time since I utilized that idea for exploring non-coding agents at Earendil. And I’m not alone! In the meantime, multiple people have explored this space and I felt it was…

Over the years, acronyms have come and gone to describe America’s tech darlings — the companies college grads dream of joining and Wall Street investors love to watch. First, it was FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.Then came the Magnificent Seven.Now, in the age of generative AI, a…

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works Home / Latest / Opinion / Here’s why I prefer to shoot with older Canon EF lenses Dan Mold 19 October 2025 / 10:30 BST17 October 2025 / 11:11 BST Canon EF 50mm f1.2 L USM As a photographer shooting…

by Gary Borjesson To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for,…

This is a story you know, right? It’s early in the war and western Europe has fallen. Only the Channel stands between Britain and the fascist yoke; only Atlantic shipping lanes offer hope of the population continuing to be fed, clothed and armed. But hunting “wolf packs” of Nazi U-boats pick off…

In a world with over five million podcasts, Dwarkesh Patel stands out as an unexpected trailblazer. At just 23 years old, he has caught the attention of influential figures such as Jeff Bezos, Noah Smith, Nat Friedman, and Tyler Cowen, who have all praised his interviews — the latter describing…

Werner Herzog on Psychotherapy: A Review of Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Oct 19, 2025 | A Review of Into the Abyss by Werner Herzog Trigger Warning: This essay discusses capital punishment, murder, violence, death, and contains descriptions of…

Edward Hopper, Ground Swell, 1939, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. Historical Context Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was an American painter known for his images reflecting isolation and loneliness like his most famous painting, Nighthawks. He was born in Nyack, New York, a port on the…